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Archive for the ‘Personal space’ Category

Prompted by the visit to Belfast we decided it would be a good idea to formally examine our (Leeds met) sharing philosophy regarding LOs. As this hasn’t been previously represented I also thought it might be a good idea to model pre and post sharing with regard to the repository. Again I have fallen back on adapting UML case studies to visualise these processes. Generally these are read from top to bottom connections show potential decision points, where either, both or none of the following process may be undertaken. Actors represent roles or systems playing a role within a process.

To facilitate this development I cornered our repository officer Nick Sheppard and did a short interview. I doubt there will be time to do a full transcription of this but it did give me some insight into past and future aspirations for the repository and the workflows surrounding it. I’m uploading three of the four intended workflows now, in case time runs away, with evaluations are my top of my agenda at the moment.

Pre-repository shows some learning content being packaged as a learning object using such applications as Course Genie and eCat. Similar to Belfast theses were often used within the VLE. The predominant process was the creation of content and storage on personal or shared drives. Conversations between colleagues were the main driving force for sharing; this resulted in direct hard drive access for the resource, link sharing or a hard copy being reciprocated, depending on the nature of the content and storage facilitated by the tutor.

The current state of affairs, extracted from the conversation with Nick, again has some strong links with Belfast. As we are still discussing the various issues regarding general public release of Leeds Met learning objects, all current upload and potentially any search and download, request go through the repository officer. The repository is as yet not ready for general institution-wide access, with only small pockets currently populating it under Nick’s guidance. One of the most difficult tasks regarding this filtration through one team is the back and forth communication required to gain complete metadata particularly. This is particularly prevalent when checking the copyright of repurposed learning objects.

The vision is to enable individuals to upload and download from the repository as part of their natural content development process. To enable this, the repository needs to be accessed from what ever personal work point an individual chooses to use. This is my simplistic version of this vision with and emphases on as few and seamless connections to as many interfaces as possible. I’m sure others including Nick will add to and comment on this to give it a more robust appearance.

The final and missing diagram, I’m currently extracting form Nicks interview, tries to capture the perceived next step…..

Although I originally planed to do a day by day account of our visit to Belfast Met I decided that this would not give a coherent and clear view of the workflows that they have developed. Also Nick has already voiced the more personal aspects of the visit, so I won’t be repeating them here. The following report discusses the creation, use and sharing of learning objects. Overall there is a strong culture of learning object use which has been supported by a dedicated team both technically and artisticly. As Nick has pointed out in his post, there is little metadata creation. The primary reason for this is that currently there is no real need for it at Belfast Met. Learning objects are repurposed form subscription repositories or the internet and placed within the VLE for immediate use. Bespoke creations are listed for general perusal but no formal repository has yet been required. This is very different form the culture that is developing at Leeds met and is most likely given to the different natures of teaching at FE and HE. However it has proved an insightful counterpoint to the problems we have faced and the solutions we have been developing.

Started looking into the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) the other day. Downloaded all the kit and got everything almostworking within the Eclipse IDE. The tutorial I used didn’t completely work but I got the general idea. Next need to play with the downloaded samples and a web app of my own. Its going to be a busy week. I’m doing this for two reasons. Mark and Mike have built the input and processing elements of the Learning Object search tool, see post here. My job now is to take Mark’s output and do something visually funky with it. The GWT promises to be the easiest method to do this. I write in Java and it produces Ajax interactivity in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, without all the browser conflicts.

The second reason is that we’re hoping to transfer the metadata generator we have developed into a widget. So by using the GWT to produce the second prototype, I should have enough know-how to do this transfer simply. Once we have some widgets we can have a look at putting them together as personal space on something such as iGoogle or FaceBook

As an aside I had a mess around with iGoogle today to see what I could put together. I didn’t release just how much was no available. I set up a work page, from my perspective and this is what I was able to access form one spot:

GMail account

Del.icio.us links

Sticky Notes

TO-DO List

Multi-chat tool including Skype, MSN and Yahoo

Google Notebook

Direct blogging link to blogger & Word press

Google docs

Google groups

Google reader linked to all my project blogs

Google calendar

Twitter feeds and post

Flicker

Face book

I think I’ve covered almost everything I need 🙂

I blogged this from the google widget, but i wasn’t able to edit the formatting so just sent it in as a draft. The tags became catagories so something not working there. Not quite as instant acess as I would like, i’m editing it now in wordpress. Ther is no preview or image upload form the widget. It will get there I’m sure.